Thursday 26 May 2011

Shape Your Own Personality

Over time, a remarkable thing will happen. As you read and review your personal mission statement, you will find yourself, almost unconsciously, shaping your words and conforming your behaviors so that you are more and more like the ideal person you have defined. People will notice the change in you almost immediately. Over time, you will find that you are actually creating within yourself the kind of character and personality that you most admire in others. You will have become the molder and the shaper of your own personal destiny. After you have applied the ABC Method to your list, you will now be completely organized and ready to get more important things done faster.

Compare Yourself Against Yourself

Once you have developed a mission statement like this, you can read it, review it, edit it, and upgrade it regularly. You can add additional qualities to it and more clearly define the qualities you've already listed. It becomes your personal credo, your philosophy of life, your statement of beliefs and a guide to your behavior in all your interactions with others. Each day, you can evaluate your behaviors and compare them against the standard that you have set in this statement.

Determine Your Mission Statement

Your goal is that, a year from today, when one of your customers has lunch with one of your prospects, and your prospect asks your customer to describe you in detail as a salesperson, your customer will recite your business mission statement voluntarily. The way you have treated your customer will have been so exemplary that your customer will describe you in the most glowing of terms.

Program Yourself Correctly

Your subconscious mind can only accept your mission statement as a set of commands when you phrase it in the present, positive and personal tenses. "I am an exceptional salesperson," is a perfect example. After every sales call, you should quickly reread your mission statement and ask yourself if your recent behavior was more like the person you want to be, or less? As a top sales performer, you are always comparing your sales activities against a high standard and adjusting your activities upward. You're continually striving to be better. Every day in every way, you are deliberately working to become more like the ideal person you have envisioned.

Programming Yourself for Success

Your mission statement is always written in the present tense, as though you have already become the person that you have described. It is always positive rather than negative. And it is always personal.

The Fastest Way To Increase Sales

Social media is the hands down number one way to attract new customers and increase your sales. Of course most people won’t complain when it helps cut their marketing costs and their profit margins go up too.
Like anything new, social media has gotten a lot of hype and I know for a fact that some companies have poured a ton of time and money into trying to sell with social media. It’s been like a black hole for them, while a few others have used it successfully to make their sales soar.
Which is why when I heard that my colleague, Charlie Cook, had lined up 14 of the top experts in social media and persuaded them to reveal how they did it, I wanted to share it with you.

Social Media Sells More

The simple answer is social media. You know, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn - even your company blog. That’s what some of the most successful companies are doing this year to increase their profits. And you can, too – if you know the simple secrets to tapping these free social media sites.

The Ultimate Sales Goal

The goal of selling is to build relationships with customers, whether you’re selling a car or consulting. Then you can sell them services, more cars and generate an unending stream of referrals.
The trick to being successful is to focus, not on the act of selling, but on getting attention and building relationships. And with each additional one you develop, you’ve added another income stream for life.

Monday 16 May 2011

Seven Formulas For Business Success

Learn What You Need To Learn
Remember this, though, most businesses fail because of manager incompetence. So take the time to learn what you need to know to succeed. Be patient. The time you invest before you start will pay off over and over again in the months and years ahead.

Seven Formulas For Business Success

Start Off Part Time
One final thing that you can do, and I've recommended that many people do this over the years, is if you're starting off with no mo ney, go to work part-time for a business in a field that interests you. It's a great form of on-the-job training. Work evenings or work week ends. Or work on your holidays if you like.

Sometimes a business that looks big from the outside will look terrible once you start working for it. But sometimes when you start working for a business, you start to get a great understanding of how it works and you get insights on how you can improve it.

Seven Formulas For Business Success

Use Fin ancial Leverage
And number seven, use fin ancial leverage. Fin ancial leverage is business borr owing, lines of cre dit from the bank, which are based on the cas h flow from your successful business. The whole aim of starting a business is to develop a consistent, predictable source of cas h flow in excess of cost and expenses and then to hold to the mo ney. Banks will lend you all the mo ney that you can service as deb t with your cas h flow.

Seven Formulas For Business Success

Pick Your People Carefully
Number six, carefully select the people to help you expand and grow. The biggest mistakes you'll ever make will be in picking the wrong people to work with, so be very, very careful in picking the people you're going to work with in your business.

Seven Formulas For Business Success

Test, Test, Test
Number four, test every major move before you invest in it. Test, test, test. Don't plunge into a business. Move ahead carefully, one step at a time. Number five, expand on the basis of your successes, out of your profits, as you move along. In other words, only expand your business on mo ney that you've earned in the business, not on borrowed capital.

Seven Formulas For Business Success

Bootstrap Your Way To Success
One of the best ways to build a business is to start off on a bootstrap. This means that you start off with very little mo ney and you grow your business with the mo ney that you ear n in the business, rather than outside financing, borr owing, l oans from friends and so on.

Seven Formulas For Business Success

Visualize Your Goals
There are seven formulas for business success. Number one, set a specific goal and visualize it as a reality. Play the picture of your goal as already realized on the screen of your mind over and over again. Number two, look for a problem you can solve with a product or service that is high quality and good value. All successful businesses are based on products or services that are high quality and good value. Number three, start small and learn your business thoroughly. Be patient. Invest time rather than a lot of mo ney.

Three Factors for Financial Success

Save Your Money
The third type of leverage is money. Money is a powerful source of leverage and usually follows the development of knowledge and skill in your field. One of the reasons that it takes money to make money is that the accumulation of funds is an essential step in the development of the personal qualities and character that must precede the achievement of financial independence. In other words, you become the person capable of becoming financially independent by accumulating the funds that are necessary for you to achieve it.

Three Factors for Financial Success

Develop Your Skills
The second type of leverage is skill. The better you are at your job, the more you will be paid. The top 20 percent of salespeople earn as much as ten and fifteen times the average earnings of the bottom 80 percent. There are three keys to developing the leverage of skill. First, make a decision to be the best. Pay any price. Make any sacrifice. Go any distance to become excellent at what you do. Second, engage in continuous improvement. Never allow yourself to become satisfied or complacent at your current level of skill. And third, always strive to exceed the expectations of your customers, your boss, of the people you serve. Always do more and better than you're paid for.

Three Factors for Financial Success

Become an Expert
First, become an expert in your chosen field. Read all the books, take all the courses, listen to all the audio programs. Second, specialize in those areas that are of greatest importance and greatest value to your company or to your customers. And the third key is know your product or service inside out. Aim to be recognized as the industry expert in your field. Remember the person who has the expertise has a far greater contribution to make than the person whose knowledge is just average.

Three Factors for Financial Success

What do wealthy people do or have that enables them to accomplish so much more than the average? I believe that these people are successful as a result of what I call leverage. Leverage is the key to maximizing and multiplying your potential for success and financial achievement. Here are three examples of leverage that you can develop to achieve financial independence:

Do What You Do Best; Delegate the Rest

Put it in Writing
Before the delegated assignment is launched, there is one additional important step. Have the entire process described to this point documented in a written agreement. Then, have each of you sign it. Psychologically, this final step transforms your mutual understanding into a commitment.

Do What You Do Best; Delegate the Rest

Agree on Consequences
What will be the consequences of the person successfully completing the delegated task? Are these consequences known by the person charged with the responsibility of carrying them out? Are they important to him? Will they serve to motivate him? The consequences do not have to be enormous, but they should be meaningful to him. Otherwise they will have little effect. Their emotional import is what will have the greatest affect.

Do What You Do Best; Delegate the Rest

Establish Benchmarks
It will be important for both of you to be able to gauge the progress being made as the delegated task is carried out. Specifically, how will you measure this progress? Reach agreement on the yardstick by which you will make such judgments.

Do What You Do Best; Delegate the Rest

Set a Deadline
Set a clear deadline for completion of the delegated task. Do not be vague. An ambiguous target such as "sometime next week," or "as soon as you can get it done" will not serve either of you well. Without a clearly defined completion date, there will be no sense of urgency, and the job may very well drag on ad infinitum, frustrating you both.

Do What You Do Best; Delegate the Rest

Define the Task Clearly
Be clear as to your intended outcome. What is the end result you want to achieve when the delegated task has been completed? Make every effort to describe this clearly to the person to whom you are delegating the task. Then ask her to repeat her understanding of the assigned task. If her description is not an accurate summary of what you want to accomplish, explain the differences in detail and ask her to again feed back to you her understanding of the assignment. If the two of you do not start out on the same page, there is little likelihood of success.

Do What You Do Best; Delegate the Rest

Delegate to a Person with Demonstrated Competence
Having determined what to delegate, the next step is to select the person to whom you will delegate the task. If you delegate an important task to a person who is incapable of performing adequately, you are setting that individual up for failure while inviting disappointment and frustration on your part. This is not to say the person has to be as capable as you. But he must have sufficient skills and experience to effectively perform the delegated task. Choose carefully. It is in the best interest of the person to whom you are delegating and of course, in your own best interest as well.

Do What You Do Best; Delegate the Rest

There is a strong likelihood that the things you do best are those for which you would pay another person your hourly rate. Another way of stating this is, "delegate any tasks that can be performed by a person earning less than your hourly rate—or your desired hourly rate."

Make Your Life a Masterpiece

Personal Fulfillment
The seventh ingredient of success is personal fulfillment. This is the feeling that you are becoming everything that you are capable of becoming. It is the sure knowledge that you are moving toward the realization of your full potential as a human being.

Make Your Life a Masterpiece

Self Knowledge and Self-Awareness
The sixth ingredient of success is self-knowledge and self-awareness. To perform at your best you need to know who you are and why you think and feel the way you do. It is only when you understand and accept yourself that you can begin moving forward in other areas of your life.

Make Your Life a Masterpiece

Worthy Goals and Ideals
The fifth ingredient of success is worthy goals and ideals. To be truly happy, you need a clear sense of direction. You need to feel that your life stands for something, that you are somehow making a valuable contribution to your world.

Make Your Life a Masterpiece

Financial Freedom
The fourth ingredient of success is financial freedom. Achieving your financial freedom is one of the most important goals and responsibilities of your life. A feeling of freedom is essential to the achievement of any other important goal, and you cannot be free until and unless you have enough money so that you are no longer preoccupied with it. When you decide exactly what you want your financial picture to look like, you will be able to use this system to achieve your goals faster than you might have imagined possible.

Make Your Life a Masterpiece

Loving Relationships
The third ingredient of success is loving relationships. These are relationships with the people you love and care about, and the people who love and care about you. They are the real measure of how well you are doing as a human being. At almost any time, you can measure how well you are doing in your relationship by one simple test: laughter. This is true for companies as well. High-performance, high profit organizations are those in which people laugh and joke together. Examine your relationships, one by one, and develop a plan to make each of them enjoyable and satisfying.

Make Your Life a Masterpiece

Health and Energy
The second ingredient of success is health and energy. Just as peace of mind is your normal and natural mental state, health and energy is your normal and natural physical state. If you achieve all kinds of things in the material world, but lose your health then you will get little or no pleasure from your other accomplishments. So imagine yourself enjoying perfect health, and think of how you would be if you were your ideal image of physical fitness. Then strive for your mental goal of fitness and health.

Make Your Life a Masterpiece

Peace of Mind
The first of these seven ingredients of success, and easily the most important, is peace of mind. It is the highest human good. Without it, nothing else has much value. In corporations, peace of mind can be measured in terms of the amount of harmony that exists among coworkers. The wonderful truth about peace of mind is that it is your normal natural condition. It is the basic precondition for enjoying everything else.

Make Your Life a Masterpiece

The Seven Ingredients of Success
Your ideal life is a blending these seven ingredients in exactly the combination that makes you the happiest at any particular moment. By defining your success and happiness in terms of one or more of these seven ingredients, you create a clear target to aim it. You can then measure how well you're doing. You can identify the areas where you need to make changes if you want your life to improve.

Make Your Life a Masterpiece

This is the age of achievement. Never have more people accomplished more things in more different fields than they are accomplishing today. More people are becoming successful at a faster rate than at any other time in history. There have never been more opportunities for you to turn your dreams into realities than there are right now.

Wednesday 11 May 2011

Law of Ambition

The Law of Ambition Leaders have an intense desire to lead; they have a clear vision of a better future, which they are determined to realize. Vision is the one common quality that separates leaders from non-leaders. Leaders have a clear picture of the kind of future they want to create, and they have the ability to communicate this vision to others in an exciting and inspiring way.

Tuesday 10 May 2011

Welcome To Austria cash club: JOB FOR MEMBERS

Welcome To Austria cash club: JOB FOR MEMBERS: "To further our desire of improving the economic power of all and gain a faster and wider coverage,leaders are needed for sub-regional manage..."

Saturday 7 May 2011

How to Handle Any Objection

Listen Carefully
When you get an objection, hear it out completely. Don't assume that you know what the prospect is going to say. Often the prospect will begin with an objection you've heard before, but then will add her own particular concern or problem at the end. Be patient. Practice your listening skills. Pause before replying. Question for clarification.

How to Handle Any Objection

Make It Easy to Object
Above all, make it easy to object. Most customers do not want to get into an argument or a debate with you over your product or service. They will be reluctant to object for feat that you will become upset or adamant. For this reason you must make it easy for the customer to object by responding in a cheerful, friendly, constructive way when he does

How to Handle Any Objection

Give a Good Reason
Another way to deal with an objection is to treat it as if the customer is asking you for a reason to eliminate the objection. If the customer says, "I can't afford it," you can imagine that the customer is really saying, "Show me how I can justify spending this amount of money."

How to Handle Any Objection

Interpret It as a Question
Aside from using testimonials, another way to deal with objections is for you to take the objection and interpret it as a question. Treat it as a request for more information. Recognize that an objection is a natural customer response to any offering where there is some risk of purchasing. When the prospect says, "It costs too much," you can respond by saying. "That's a good question. Why does it cost more than you're expected to pay?" You then go on to answer the question you have posed.

How to Handle Any Objection

Use a Testimonial
As you already know, one of the most powerful ways to eliminate objections is to present testimonial letters from satisfied customers who shared the objection at one time. A sweetheart letter answering a customer's major concern is a potent way to demolish the objection forever.

How to Handle Any Objection

There are no sales without objections. Objections indicate interest. Objections are signposts that lead you step-by-step toward closing the sale. The fact is, if there are no objections, there is no interest. If there is no interest, there will be no sale.

The Power of Leverage

Leveraging Other People's Contacts of Other People's Credibility
Everyone you know has friends, acquaintances, and professional contacts. Many of these people can make a positive impact on your career or business. Among all the people you know or are connected to in some way, who might open doors for you?

The Power of Leverage

Leveraging Other People's Ideas
A single good idea, developed with passion and commitment, can give birth to a fortune. The greater your exposure to a range of ideas—gained through reading, studying, interaction, and experimentation—the greater the chance you will come across one that will lead you to enduring success.

The Power of Leverage

Leveraging Other People's Failures
As Benjamin Franklin said, "Man can either buy his wisdom or borrow it. By buying it, he pays full price in personal time and treasure. By borrowing it, he capitalizes on the lessons learned from the failures of others." Listen carefully to the stories of truly successful people. Those who genuinely wish to support you will share with you their failures as well as their successes.

The Power of Leverage

Leveraging Other People's Successes
Study the successes that other people and companies have achieved to gain insights into their challenges and solutions. Most successful people have paid their dues in terms of money, energy, commitment, and even failure to arrive at the top of their fields. Learn from their experiences.

The Power of Leverage

Leveraging Other People's Money
Knowing how and when to take advantage of other people's money—by borrowing or otherwise tapping into other people's financial resources—empowers you to achieve things that would be beyond your reach if you relied solely on your own resources. Seek out opportunities to borrow and invest, achieving returns in excess of the cost of the borrowed funds. Among the many sources for funds, consider, for example, chartered banks, savings and loan associations, venture capitalists, and public and private offerings of securities.

The Power of Leverage

Leveraging Other People's Knowledge
Applying one simple piece of key knowledge to your situation can make a world of difference in the result you achieve. Finding and applying knowledge from another source can spare you tremendous amounts of money and labor. Follow the lead of successful people and scan books, magazines, tapes, articles, and conferences for ideas and insights you can use to help you achieve your goals faster.

The Power of Leverage

Leveraging Other People's Energy
The most productive people make sure they have time for the few things that give them the highest payoff by routinely seeking to delegate or outsource their lower-value activities.

The Power of Leverage

Studying and practicing the principles of effective delegation have given you the foundation necessary to exploit the power of leverage. We will now examine other forms of this key tool of professional and business success. Each of the seven forms of leverage can help you expand the reach of your own talents and strengths. Each involves building on the work, talents, experiences, and contacts of other people.

The Major Obstacle to Financial Success

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, recognize and accept that virtually everyone who has money today at one time was broke and probably broke for a long time. Then they learned the skills of accumulating money and they are now financially independent. Whatever they have done, you can probably do as well.

Second, become a student of money from this day forward. Study it, learn about it and apply the lessons you discover toward your own financial life until you begin to attract more and more money in your direction.

The Major Obstacle to Financial Success

Money is Neutral
The Bible says, "The love of money is the root of all evil." It doesn't say, "money is the root of all evil." It says, "the love of money is the root of all evil." It is the preoccupation with money, to the exclusion of the really important things in life that is the problem, not the money itself. Money is essential to our lives in society. It is also neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It is only the way that it is acquired and the uses to which it is put that determines whether it is helpful or hurtful.

The Major Obstacle to Financial Success

Open Any Door
Money is good. Money gives you choices and enables you to live your life the way you want to live it. Money opens doors for you that would have been closed in its absence. But just like anything, an obsession can be hurtful. If a person becomes so preoccupied with money that he loses sight of the fact that money is merely a tool that is to be used to acquire happiness, then money becomes a harmful thing.

The Major Obstacle to Financial Success

Be A No-Limit Thinker
The starting point of accumulating money is for you to believe that you have an unlimited capacity to obtain all the money that you will ever need. Look upon yourself as a financial success just waiting for a place to happen. And see yourself as deserving all you can honestly acquire.

The Major Obstacle to Financial Success

Become Skilled With Money
Sometimes people say that they are not very good with money. But being good with money is a skill that anyone can learn through practice. Usually, saying that one is not very good with money is merely an excuse or a rationalization for the fact that the person is not very successful or disciplined with money. The person has not learned how to acquire it or to hold on to it.

The Major Obstacle to Financial Success

Treat Money With Care and Attention
The fact is that money is very much like a lover. It must be courted and coaxed and flattered and treated with care and attention. It gravitates toward people who respect it and value it and are capable of doing worthwhile things with it. It flows through the fingers and flees from people who do not understand it, or who do not take proper care of it.

The Major Obstacle to Financial Success

The Biggest Demotivator of All
They have been raised with a steady drumbeat of destructive criticism, as I was, that has led them to conclude, at an unconscious level, that they don't really deserve to be successful and happy. The worst effect of negative experiences in childhood, which are all too common, is that when people actually do succeed as the result of hard work, they feel guilty. These guilt feelings then cause them to do things to get rid of the money, to throw it away. They spend it or invest it foolishly. They lend it, lose it or give it away. They engage in self-sabotage, in the form of overeating, excessive drinking, drug usage, marital infidelity and often dramatic personality changes. To change your results with money, you have to change your attitude toward it.

The Major Obstacle to Financial Success

The major mental obstacle to financial success is that some people believe that they don't really deserve to be rich.

Be a Sales Superstar

Dedicate Yourself to Continuous Learning
To earn more, you must learn more. You are "maxed out" today at your current level of knowledge and skill. You cannot get more or better results by simply working harder using your present abilities. If you want to earn more in the future, you must learn and apply new methods and techniques. Remember the old saying: "The more you do of what you're doing, the more you'll get of what you're getting."

Be a Sales Superstar

Dedicate Yourself to Continuous Learning
To earn more, you must learn more. You are "maxed out" today at your current level of knowledge and skill. You cannot get more or better results by simply working harder using your present abilities. If you want to earn more in the future, you must learn and apply new methods and techniques. Remember the old saying: "The more you do of what you're doing, the more you'll get of what you're getting."

Be a Sales Superstar

Position Yourself as a Real Professional
Top salespeople see themselves as consultants rather than salespeople. They see themselves as advisors, helpers, counselors, and friends to their clients and customers. They see themselves as problem solvers more than anything else.

Be a Sales Superstar

Put Your Whole Heart into Your Selling
Selling has often been called a transfer of enthusiasm. The more enthusiastic and convinced you are about what you are selling, the more contagious this enthusiasm will be and the more your customers will sense it and act on it. Human beings are primarily emotional in everything they so and say. This is why caring is a critical element in successful selling.

Be a Sales Superstar

Act As If It Were Impossible to Fail
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are, and always have been, the greatest enemies of success and happiness. For this reason, top salespeople work continually to confront the fears that hold most salespeople back. The two major fears that stand as the greatest obstacle on your road to success are the fear of failure, or loss, and the fear of criticism, or rejection. These are the major enemies to be overcome.

Be a Sales Superstar

Commit to Excellence
Ambitious people have one remarkable characteristic in sales. They dream big dreams. They have high aspirations. They see themselves as capable of being the best in their fields. They know that the top 20 percent of salespeople make 80 percent of the sales, and they are determined to be among that top group.

Be a Sales Superstar

This is a wonderful time to be alive and working in the profession of selling. Regardless of the ups and downs of the economy or temporary changes in your industry, there have never been more opportunities for you to achieve more of your goals—and enjoy a higher standard of living—than exist today by selling more of your products and services in the marketplace.

Friday 6 May 2011

The Law of Abundance

Review Your Reasons
Why aren't you rich already? Write down all the reasons you can think of. Go over your answers one by one with someone who knows you well and ask them for their opinion. You may be surprised to find that your reasons are mostly excuses that you have fallen in love with.

Whatever your reasons or excuses, you can now get rid of them. The world is full of hundreds and thousands of people who have had far more difficulties to overcome than you could ever imagine, and they've gone on to be successful anyway. So can you.

The Law of Abundance

Examine Your Own Thinking
In the book, The Instant Millionaire, by Mark Fisher, the old millionaire asks the boy who has sought his advice about becoming a millionaire, "Why aren't you rich already?"

This is an important question to ask yourself. However you answer this question will reveal a lot about yourself. Your answers will expose your self-limiting beliefs, your doubts, your fears, your excuses, your rationalizations and your justifications.

The Law of Abundance

Examine Your Own Thinking
In the book, The Instant Millionaire, by Mark Fisher, the old millionaire asks the boy who has sought his advice about becoming a millionaire, "Why aren't you rich already?"

This is an important question to ask yourself. However you answer this question will reveal a lot about yourself. Your answers will expose your self-limiting beliefs, your doubts, your fears, your excuses, your rationalizations and your justifications.

The Law of Abundance

Make a Decision
The first corollary of the Law of Abundance says that, "People become wealthy because they decide to become wealthy."

They become wealthy because they believe they have the ability to become wealthy. Because they believe this completely, they act accordingly. They consistently take the necessary actions that turn their beliefs into realities. And you can always tell what your beliefs really are by looking at your actions. There is no other way.

The second corollary of this law says: "People are poor because they have not yet decided to become rich."

The Law of Abundance

You Can Have All You Want
There is plenty of money available to you. There is no real shortage. You can have virtually all you really want and need. We live in a generous universe and we are surrounded on all sides by blessings and opportunities to acquire all we truly desire. Your attitude, of either abundance or scarcity toward money, will have a major impact on whether you become rich or not.

The Law of Abundance

The Law of Abundance- there is ample money for everyone who knows how to acquire it and keep it. We live in an abundant universe in which there is sufficient money for all who really want it and are willing obey the laws governing its acquisition.

Prepare for Your Journey

Prepare a Checklist

Pilots carefully review a checklist prior to every flight. Even if they have flown thousands of hours and have been active pilots for twenty years, they still go through the checklist every single time. You should prepare a checklist as well. No matter how many times you have made the same trip, you should review your checklist once more. Never trust to memory. The failure to check just one critical detail can leave you stranded and maybe even put your destination out of reach. As you proceed toward your personal destinations and struggle toward your goals, the consequences of not following your checklist will not be as severe. But it is not unusual for a business to go broke or a person to lose all his or her money because someone failed to pay attention to a critical detail.

Prepare for Your Journey

Refuse to be Passive

My traveling experiences have taught me two things. First, prepare for the worst. No matter what anyone tells you, be prepared for the possibility that he or she will not follow through. Second, be proactive, not passive. Instead of becoming angry or depressed, get busy and get going. Find an alternative. Refuse to accept the current situation if it is not satisfactory. Instead of waiting for things to happen, make things happen.

Prepare for Your Journey

Plan for Any Eventuality

The mark of a superior thinker is that he or she assumes that the worst will happen and makes provisions against it. Napoleon Bonaparte was once asked if he believed in luck. He replied, “Yes, I do. I believe in bad luck. I believe I will always have it, and I plan accordingly.”

Prepare for Your Journey

Guard Against the Worst

For me, as a professional speaker and seminar leader, the worst thing that could happen would be for my luggage to be lost and for me to arrive without the clothes and seminar materials that I need for my speaking engagement. To guard against this situation, I carry all my essentials on board with me, never out of my sight. Because of this habit of advance planning, I have never had an insurmountable problem because of baggage delays or losses. On the way to your destination, in the achievement of your most important goal, continually ask yourself, "What are the worst possible things that can happen?" And then guard against them.

Prepare for Your Journey

Preparation is the mark of a professional. Preparation is also the mark of a successful person in any field. As you move upward in any occupation, you will find that the top people spend far more time in preparation than the average person does. The top 10 percent in any field are always more thoroughly prepared in every detail than those who struggle for a living in the same occupation.

Closing Techniques: The "I Want to Think it Over" Close

Remain Silent
Again, you remain perfectly silent while you wait for his answer. In many cases, he will think about it for a few seconds, even a minute or longer, and then he will give you his final concern or objection. He will finally tell you what is really on his mind. He will tell you the real reason why he is hesitating about going ahead.

If you can now satisfy him on this final condition, you can go on to conclude the sale. You can say, "Mr. Prospect, what if we could do this...?" Or, "I think there is a perfect answer to that question."

Closing Techniques: The "I Want to Think it Over" Close

Probe the Answer
If he says that "Yes, it's the money," you immediately go into a series of questions designed to deal with concerns about cost or price. You ask things like, "How do you mean, exactly? Why do you say that? Why do you feel that way? How far apart are we? Is price your only concern, or is there something else?"

If he says that, "No, it's not the money," you reply by asking "May I ask what it is?"

Closing Techniques: The "I Want to Think it Over" Close

Wait Patiently
Again, you have nothing to lose. If you leave, you have lost this person as a prospect forever. The worst thing that he can say is that he has no particular reason but that he still wants to think it over. However, in many cases, he will reply by saying one of two things. He will say, "Yes, I'm concerned about the cost." Or, he will say, "No, it's not the money."

Closing Techniques: The "I Want to Think it Over" Close

Ask Curiously
You then ask, in a curious tone of voice: "Mr. Prospect obviously you have a good reason for wanting to think it over. May I ask what it is; is it the money?"

Remain perfectly silent, watching his face. Smile gently. Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. This is a critical moment.

Closing Techniques: The "I Want to Think it Over" Close

Be Agreeable and Prepared
This is how you use it. When the prospect says, "I want to think it over," you appear to accept it gracefully. You smile agreeably, and begin packing your briefcase and putting your materials away. As you do, you make conversation with these words: "Mr. Prospect, that's a good idea. This is an important decision and you shouldn't rush into it." These words will cause the prospect to mentally relax. He sees that you are on your way. His resistance will drop as soon as you stop presenting and trying to sell.

Closing Techniques: The "I Want to Think it Over" Close

People Are Often Ready to Buy
On the other hand, as many as 50 percent of the people you speak to are probably ready to buy at this point. They just need a little push. They need some help. A buying decision is traumatic for them. They are tense and uneasy, and afraid of making a mistake. They may be right on the verge of saying "yes" and they need the professional guidance of an excellent salesperson. But if you accept the "I want to think it over" at face value and depart, you will probably never get a chance to see them or to sell to them again.

Closing Techniques: The "I Want to Think it Over" Close

Saving the Lost Sale
There is a powerful technique you can learn called the "I Want To Think It Over Close." This is the only way I know to save this kind of lost sale. You know by now that when the customer says, "I want to think it over," he is really saying "good bye." You know from your own experience that customers do not think it over. They do not sit there carefully studying your brochures and price lists with a calculator and a pen.

Kick Open the Doors

Start This Very Minute
The time for you and I to begin to appreciate how valuable and precious each minute is, is right now, not a later time when our minutes and hours are draining away.

Kick Open the Doors

Make a Decision Today
You can put your life and career into an upward trajectory by making the decision, today, that you are going to become one of the best time managers in your field. And in this session, you will learn how to do it.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of."

Kick Open the Doors

Exploit Your Most Precious Resource
Time is your most precious resource. It is all you really have. It is your life. As long as you have lots of time, you can do almost anything. But if your time is cut off for any reason, all of your possibilities are cut off as well.

Queen Elizabeth I of England was one of the richest women in the world. She owned half the country. Yet, when she was on her deathbed, she turned to her doctor and said, "I would give all I have for a few more minutes of time."

Kick Open the Doors

Anyone who does a great job consistently, over and over, kicks open the doors of opportunity in all directions. Such a person will be hired, paid well, promoted, advanced and given additional responsibilities because there are so few of them.